How can a morning coffee improve everyone’s commute?

Putting passengers at the centre

As a full lifecycle engineering consultancy, our goal is to provide passengers across the UK’s transport network with the best possible service. To achieve this, we put the utmost thought into the design, build and operation of the thousands of roads, railways, bridges, and stations that connect our country. As an industry, we often focus on the built environment and physical assets – but do we truly understand how it is being used or when - or even why?

To design, operate and maintain the best possible infrastructure, we need to put commuters at the centre of our focus. We need accurate, instant, and actionable data on infrastructure’s core purpose – the movement of people. To access that data, we must tap into the UK’s largest invisible and readily available sensor network – mobile network data.

State of flux

Travel patterns are constantly changing, and the pandemic ripped up much of what we thought we knew about how people move as they go about their daily lives. Home working has disrupted the traditional rush hour periods, and the role of train stations is shifting from solely transport interchanges to a blended community and retail space for locals working from home. This creates challenges for transport planners as they aim to maximise the benefit of their next project, and transport operators who want to understand customer needs and optimise the service they offer them.

On our highways, there is a huge demand to decarbonise our network. While sales of EVs in the UK, for example, are booming, the national charging network is struggling to expand rapidly enough, with question marks over the optimal locations for installation. Across both networks, extreme weather has seen increased pressure on maintenance, with infrastructure owners desperate to understand where best to target their response while passengers sit and wait.

It’s clear to get the best return on new projects or enhance our existing network, we need to understand how people move around the transport network and why. Unlike assets, people have hearts and minds, and while we are creatures of habit, understanding our patterns can at times be crystal ball gazing – or can it?

Vote with your feet

Mobile network data capability is one of the best kept secrets in data science and infrastructure. The UK’s largest invisible sensor network track's location and movement information from every person’s mobile phone. The volume of data, from circa 60 million phones, allows planners, operators and investors to review millions of real-life journeys to gather insights, where previously highly manual roadside interviews had to suffice.

Mobile network data exists already and involves no additional maintenance or infrastructure. If you wanted to create a network of millions of sensors from scratch, it would take huge amounts of time, effort and money, and yet, we have this resource at our fingertips.

One of the key benefits is flexibility and the ability to re-evaluate your data and map new trends and changes. Mobile network data is a continuous flow of movements, rather than samples captured from a certain period in time, meaning decision- makers can keep pace with changing patterns and ‘the new normal’.

It can also provide hard evidence on where the best return is for large infrastructure projects. For example, mobile network data enabled Dorset County Council to identify the best sites where new housing could be built, based on thousands of genuine travel patterns throughout the county. This enables a considerable cost saving compared to traditional manual roadside surveys. Not only that, mobile network data helps to democratise the planning process by providing schemes that genuinely reflect real life travel preferences and patterns, giving confidence to the public that transport decisions are being taken in their interest.